Luke Stadel From 35mm to 1080p: Film, HDTV, and Image Quality in American Television

Abstract This essay explores the way technical literature on HDTV during the 1980s and 1990s functioned as a theory of television. In contrast to a long tradition of media theory in which television’s image was seen as inferior, especially in comparison to film, television researchers and technicians reversed this notion by conceiving of HDTV as the new standard of perfection in visual representation. Despite the fact that HDTV would not gain widespread acceptance during this period, these early experiments laid the foundation for the environment of media convergence around the television set that would emerge in later decades.

In 1993, Cablevision, the leading trade publication compression to increase programming volume of the cable industry, ran a feature story asking, “Is rather than signal quality, despite the fact that the hi-def dead?” The article goes on to speculate: industry had championed HDTV as the future of cable for nearly a decade. Echoing this sentiment, Has cable made high definition television one commentator likened HDTV to another obsolete, even before the technology famously failed American technology, dubbing it reaches consumers? HDTV, long the “Edsel of the consumer electronics industry.”2 heralded as the cornerstone of television’s Because of the eventual success that HDTV has future, was expected to revive the nation’s found in the early decades of the twenty-first standing in the consumer electronics century, it is tempting to dismiss such statements industry, restore its once faltering as quaintly out of touch with the inevitability microprocessing business and prove that of technological progress in electronic media, a the United States still had the ability process driven solely by the relentless engines of to develop innovative technology. But consumer capitalism. Even in 1993, most experts in a world of unlimited programming quoted in Cablevision tended to agree that the selections, carried in digital streams of prohibitively high cost of HD sets was preventing 0’s and 1’s to bigger and better NTSC the technology from proliferating widely, and that television sets, is there still a demand for HD would eventually find its place in the American the more expensive HDTV picture? With televisual landscape. This prediction has seemingly cable now on its way toward providing been borne out in recent years, especially following digital compression, do consumers want the HD-DVD/Blu-ray format war of 2006-2008, or need HDTV?1 which brought HDTV into the mainstream of the world of consumer electronics. This passage refers specifically to the then-recent While market economics are important to decision of the cable industry to use digital the history of technology, such explanations offer

“F” is for Failure 31 James Crawford and Mike Dillon, editors, Spectator 32:1 (Spring 2012): 31-36. FROM 35MM TO 1080P too neat a summary of the complex process of John Ellis would continue to assert that television decision-making as to how new technologies gain as a medium was defined by its low quality image widespread acceptance. The proposed adoption and and the distracted mode of viewing this image eventual rejection of HDTV in the late 1980s and encouraged.5 early 1990s represented a complex jurisdictional These essentialist definitions of television have conflict, in which the electronics industry, national been criticized most notably by John Caldwell, who governments, broadcasters, cable operators, argues that the rise of videographic technology regulators, and consumers all had competing and more sophisticated approaches to television stakes. Existing histories have given an overview production led to a radical break between older of HD’s role in the shifting television environment and newer modes of television style during the of the period, yet little work has been done to 1980s.6 However, because it is concerned primarily illuminate discourses surrounding HDTV during with dominant practices in the broadcast industry, the period when the technology remained largely Caldwell’s model does not account for marginal a part of the cultural imaginary. In focusing on technologies like HDTV. Although HDTV was HDTV’s later success, contemporary scholarship developed out of the same ethos as these practices, has essentially ignored the technology’s initial it was never integrated into the mainstream of failure.3 This narrative of failure is more than a television production, primarily due to the way historical curiosity, as debates over the quality of the split between broadcast and cable complicated the televisual image during the late 1980s and the adoption of a new American standard for early 1990s would help lay the foundation for image quality to be shared across both industries. the environment of convergence that currently The division between broadcast and cable made dominates American media industries. HDTV it clear that cable lacked a singular ontology, called into question long-held notions of the making the adoption of new technologies a much aesthetic inferiority of the televisual image in more complicated process than it had been under comparison to the filmic image. As television the three-network oligopoly that dominated became the preferred viewing site for Hollywood television’s early decades. Much in the way that films, due to the rise of cable television and home early television was originally conceived of as video, technicians reimagined television as the site “radio with pictures,” television during the 1980s of an image that was not inferior to theatrical film was now being redefined by a combination exhibition, but rather superior to it. of new technologies, new audiences, and new To begin, HDTV must be considered relative programming sources, especially contemporary to the historical tradition of television theory, Hollywood films that were the bread and butter of which has long figured a low-quality image as a cable systems. central aspect of television’s ontology. The oldest As Caldwell notes, the meanings of new and most influential of such theories is Marshal technologies are often theorized, whether McLuhan’s definition of television as a “hot” explicitly or implicitly, by the practitioners medium. Following from his well known axiom responsible for creating television programming.7 that “the medium is the message,” he argued that However, existing histories of early experiments “the TV image is one of ‘low-definition,’ in the with HDTV have glossed over the levels of sense that it offers little detail and a low degree basic television research and creative practice of information . . . a TV close-up provides only as in favor of emphasizing the role of corporations much information as a small section of a long-shot and government agencies in the proliferation of on the movie screen.”4 In this way, the television new technologies of televisual transmission and aesthetic is defined as the inverse of cinema’s total reception. Media historian Hernán Galperin asserts and complete representation of reality, a pervasive that the development of HDTV was part of the notion in classical film theory from Andre Bazin to larger trend of the digitization of television in the Christian Metz. McLuhan’s ideas about television 1970s and 1980s, both in the UK and in America, would go largely unchallenged in subsequent which was the product of policymakers responding decades, as theorists like Raymond Williams and to a changing media landscape characterized by

32 SPRING 2012 STADEL

“the steady decline of the American and European this model, the meanings of technology can only consumer electronics sector, the international be understood by a focus on the “multiple ledgers” diffusion of the information revolution agenda, of competing discursive paradigms, rather than a and the spectrum shortage created by the rapid focus on the “single ledger” of the eventual winner growth of mobile telephony and other wireless or dominant interest.11 In the remainder of this telecommunications services.”8 Joel Brinkley’s essay, I offer an outline of the meanings of television history of HDTV uses a similar focalization produced by the researchers working to develop to Galperin’s, emphasizing major decisions by HDTV technologies. Although these technologies corporate and national political interests. Brinkley grew out of a similar set of cultural and economic offers a breezy account of the digital transition, in imperatives as Caldwell’s notion of televisuality, which he asserts that their meanings were originally negotiated through explicit debates in technical literature rather than The creation of digital, high-definition through production activities. Technical literature television is an American triumph, no published in The Journal of the Society of Motion question … the high-definition television Picture and Television Engineers (JSMPTE) offers race did spawn exceptional creative genius. a window onto a new theory of television, one at But it also a pointed up with astonishing odds with historically dominant conceptions of the clarity how willing government leaders medium. Television technicians and researchers are to use American business for their represent an important user group, and their own opportunistic ends—promoting it at interests broaden the discourse of HDTV beyond one moment, betraying it at the next.9 the political domain into discussions of aesthetics and spectatorship, how the transition to digital Thus, while Brinkley and Galperin produce television and HDTV were expected to influence slightly different narratives, they essentially offer actual television viewers. the same view of the development of HDTV, one While political decisions are not completely that I argue is too limited to offer a historically separate from the discussions taking place in adequate conception of both the period itself as JSMPTE, a study of articles published from the well as the prehistory of the current moment of period reveals that a significant proportion of the the widespread adoption of HDTV by American articles were dedicated to the aesthetics of HDTV. audiences. As implied by the name, HDTV is a term that is An especially useful model for reviving the only relevant when compared to a lower-definition mid-level discourses overlooked by Galperin and baseline, either 525 horizontal lines of resolution Brinkley is Rick Altman’s “crisis historiography.” (NTSC) or 625 lines (PAL). Thus HDTV is first Crisis historiography is a model that seeks to and foremost a concept designed for improving understand the process by which norms are the quality of televisually transmitted images.12 established and meanings are generated for new According to a retrospective account of HDTV’s media technologies through conflicts between early years published in JSMPTE, the dream of interested parties. Altman notes that “when HDTV grew out of a 1972 study undertaken by traditional media historians choose an object of the International Radio Consultative Committee analysis, they are apparently selecting something (CCIR), an international regulator of television that actually exists, such as television. In fact, standards. Author Mark Krivocheev asserts however, they are concentrating on a particular that “the goals for this high-definition service historical and cultural understanding of the included viewing at approximately three times category labeled ‘television,’ not a permanent picture height, so that the system would be fact of life.”10 By attending to the way that the virtually transparent to the quality of portrayal meanings of technology are reached through perceived in the original scene by a discerning competing agencies, crisis historiography avoids viewer with normal visual acuity.” This new system the perils of teleological thinking that so often would demonstrate “improved motion portrayal, plague the history of technology. According to perception of depth, and colorimetry” compared to

“F” IS FOR FAILURE 33 FROM 35MM TO 1080P contemporary standards, with the idea of allowing the fact that even high-definition digital images for “viewing on large, wider aspect-ratio displays contain less information than 35mm film (which that would leave viewers with the perception is composed of the equivalent of 2000 horizontal that they were surrounded by the system.”13 lines of signal), this article demonstrates that While Krivocheev acknowledges that television HDTV allows the televisual image to exceed the is no mere entertainment medium, the vision filmic image in terms of user experience.17 Thus the of HDTV he describes as being the goal of the article evidences the strong connection between earliest conceptions clearly evokes Bazin’s notion the television and film viewing experiences in of the myth of total cinema, a concept ostensibly which television is figured not as a wholly separate at odds with television’s low-resolution ontology cultural practice. Television engineers understood as theorized by McLuhan and others.14 Indeed, themselves as working for an industry that was not as Krivocheev notes, developments in HDTV only in competition with foreign manufacturers technology would not only impact the television for market share in the production of TV sets, a industry, but also the film industry that would conflict emphasized by political analyses of digital be able to make use of high-resolution digital TV, but with Hollywood for the attention of monitors, cameras, and software for the production consumers of moving images. of both analogue and digital images.15 In addition to foregrounding the television Despite the lofty ambitions of early proposals industry’s concern for using HDTV to compete for HDTV systems, early American research with projected film images, other articles on HDTV focused on defining the standards to which reveal the diversity of practices and approaches HDTV would aspire and making marginal that were proposed during this crisis period, in improvements towards that goal. Japanese which the future of television technology was not researchers had been working on HDTV since yet clearly defined. Various wider aspect ratios were the 1970s, but Western research on the subject considered, including 5:3 and 2:1 as well as the now did not begin to see publication in JSMPTE until ubiquitous 16:9. Numerous proprietary systems, the early 1980s, at the rate of no more than one which commonly tout their ability to adhere to or two articles per year. After 1985, the amount of research on HDTV showed a marked increase, and aesthetics were the subject of several articles, including one that defines 35mm projected film as the aesthetic standard for HDTV. In this article, authors Kaiser, Mahler, and McMann attempt to establish a digital equivalent for image resolution and stability comparable to projected 35mm film, from which they would directly collect their data.16 The authors establish a resolution of 700 to 800 lines as the minimum for achieving a television image equivalent to that of 35mm film, noting that doubling the number of lines to the 1050 or 1125 lines would perhaps even exceed the quality of 35mm film. In particular, the authors note that image resolution can vary immensely for theatrical filmgoers depending on where one sits in relation to the screen, with the implicit assumption being that television offers a democratic (and thus superior) viewing experience predicated on all viewers being able to occupy the same viewing position. Even though contemporary film scholars have argued for the privileged status of theatrical projection, due to HD vs. SD: the science of television viewing. JSMPTE, October 1987.

34 SPRING 2012 STADEL

Galperin and Brinkley. This heterogeneity can also be seen as speaking to the mutual imbrication of American media industries, in which television and film are much more closely related at the levels of consumption and production than top-down analyses would suggest. From the 1980s to the present day, HDTV and digital broadcasting, along with developments in cable and satellite broadcasting and home video technologies like the VCR and DVD player, have reshaped the experience of television, suggesting A proposed analog HDTV broadcast system, which was never that television today is no longer the same medium implemented. JSMPTE, October 1987. it was in 1950s when it first became a staple of existing NTSC standards, with names like SLSC, American homes.23 In studying the first failed HD-NTSC, and HD-PRO, were proposed.18 transition to HDTV, the roots of the transition Some articles advocate for the rapid development from the monolithic broadcast model to the current of an international standard,19 while others model characterized by a proliferation of uses can advocate a period of experimental transmission of be seen more clearly. While the transition may an “enhanced–definition” standard before a high- have been driven by forces at the levels of national definition standard is settled 20upon. One article policy and corporate strategy, the meanings of new proposes a hierarchization of various international technologies are always negotiated at lower levels standards, due to the differing definitions of by television’s users, including technicians, media what HDTV actually means, rather than a strict producers, and audiences. This first failed attempt standard to be followed by all countries.21 The at a transition to HDTV represented not only a diversity of perspectives is surely due, at least in conflict of national interests, but also a conflict part, to the varying nationalities of the authors, between the broadcast, cable, and film industries as who represent all three of the major international well as the various groups responsible for different televisual constituencies: Japan, Europe, and the domains within their respective industries. This United States.22 However, the individual positions conflict ultimately established the television set, go beyond simply the reproduction of national through the convergence of film and television interests; they represent an approach to the crisis aesthetics, as the new site of perfection in the of how to develop practices appropriate for the display of moving images. While “convergence” is readership of JSMPTE, namely the technicians a major buzzword in the study of media industries, who must implement these practices on an the origins of convergence remain a nebulous individual basis within their respective production concept.24 As the above analysis suggests, corporate units, in both the television industry and the mergers and national policy cannot fully account film industry. The heterogeneity demonstrated in for the social meanings of media technologies like the writings of television researchers is reflective television. Despite HDTV’s initial failure, the of the conflicting pressures that had to be debates over its development provide a window negotiated during this period by those faced with onto the reinvention of television, a silent process implementing the protocols decided at the higher that has occurred as much through failure as levels of the public sphere, the levels outlined by through success.

Luke Stadel is a Ph.D. student in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the shifts in the cultural, social, and political meanings of television driven by new technologies and new forms of programming from the 1970s to the 1990s.

“F” IS FOR FAILURE 35 FROM 35MM TO 1080P End Notes

1 “Is Hi-Def Dead?” Cablevision, 22 February, 1993, 35. 2 Tom Kerver, “HDTV: The Business Case,”Cablevision , 5 April, 1993, 24. 3 For representative discussions of HDTV’s role in contemporary media environments, see Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technology, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) and Amanda Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 71-80. 4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 314-315. 5 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1972; reprint, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1992); John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). 6 John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 7 Caldwell, Ibid. See also Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 8 Hernán Galperin, New Television, Old Politics: The Transition to Digital TV in the United States and Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15. 9 Joel Brinkley, Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1997), xiii. 10 Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 15. 11 Ibid., 22. 12 HDTV also implies an improved level of sound, an issue almost completely ignored in technical literature and a topic in need of further investigation, particular given the way the introduction of the compact disc affected discourses on home sound during the 1980s. 13 Mark I. Krivocheev, “The First Twenty Years of HDTV: 1972-1992,” The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (October 1993), 913. 14 Andre Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (1967; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 15 On the impact of digital technologies in the film industry, see John Belton, “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution,” October 100 (Spring 2002), 98-114; Lev Manovich, “What is Digital Cinema?”, http://manovich.net/TEXT/digital-cinema.html (accessed 25 February, 2011); “Cinema and Digital Media,” in Perspectives of Media Art, eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Hans Peter Schwartz (Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1996). 16 Arthur Kaiser, Henry W. Mahler, and Renville H. McMann, “ Resolution Requirements for HDTV Based Upon the Performance of 35mm Motion-Picture Films for Theatrical Viewing,” The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers ( June 1985), 654-659. 17 See, for example, D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 18 Joseph L. LoCicero, Melih Pazarci, and Theodore S. Rzeszewski, “A Compatible High Definition Television System (SLSC) with Chrominance and Aspect Ratio Improvements,” The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (May 1985), 546-558; Richard J. Iredale, “A Proposal for a New High-Definition NTSC Broadcast Protocol,” The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (October 1987), 959-970; Iredale, “HD-PRO™: A New Global High-Definition Video Production Format,” The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers( June 1989), 439-443. 19 Stan Baron, “HDTV: A Low-Cost Transition Option,” The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers ( January 1992), 6-9. 20 William F. Schreiber, “Advanced Television Systems in the United States: Getting There from Here,”The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (October 1988), 847-851. 21 Dominique Nasse and Jean Chatel, “Toward a World Studio Standard for High-Definition Television,”The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers ( June 1989), 434-438. 22 Unsurprisingly, less-developed nations are completely absent from the debate. International perspectives are available in journals like Telecommunications, which represent an important source for future study. 23 On television’s rapid integration into American homes during the 1950s, see Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 24 The theory of media convergence has been most notably explored in Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006).

36 SPRING 2012